Going to Prison Will Ruin Your Life

...or so say those who urge less prison and more resort to "community based programs" a phrase that means, roughly translated, "Let them run wild while we pretend to monitor them and then profess shock at their next murder."

Still, trying to take this seriously, is it the case that going to prison will ruin your life? Well, it's going to create complications, you bet. If you're honest, you'll have to tell prospective employers about it. The time you spend there will be time subtracted from your career. Your treatment, everything from diet to clothing to medical care, is not going to be optimal (unless you demand a sex change, in which case you get transferred to the Ritz). Sometimes the treatment can be worse than substandard; it can be abusive.

So does going to prison ruin your life? Ask Ms. Alice Herz-Sommer. And remember her story the next time a defendant or defense lawyer tells you that incarceration is the death knell of a productive future.

It's not that being sent to a US prison is "comparable" to being sent to a Nazi concentration camp. It's that being sent to a concentration camp is INcomparably worse, yet, as the story shows, can be overcome in a way we should (and almost everyone will, I'll wager) find uplifting and mind-boggling. Perhaps our constantly complaining ex-cons will learn something from this, although I doubt it.

I do not know how long the average Holocaust survivors lived after their release.